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In this celebrated, landmark history of the Balkans, Misha Glenny
investigates the roots of the bloodshed, invasions and nationalist
fervour that have come to define our understanding of the
south-eastern edge of Europe. In doing so, he reveals that groups
we think of as implacable enemies have, over the centuries, formed
unlikely alliances, thereby disputing the idea that conflict in the
Balkans is the ineluctable product of ancient grudges. And he
exposes the often-catastrophic relationship between the Balkans and
the rest of Europe, raising profound questions about recent Western
intervention. Updated to cover the last decade's brutal conflicts
in Kosovo and Macedonia, the surge of organised crime in the
region, the rise of Turkey and the rocky road to EU membership, The
Balkans remains the essential and peerless study of Europe's most
complex and least understood region.
The fifth instalment in the teen dance drama franchise directed by
Trish Sie and starring Alyson Stoner and Ryan Guzman. The film
follows multiple crews from the previous four films as they battle
it out in Las Vegas for the chance of securing their own show in
the entertainment capital of the world. The supporting cast
includes Briana Evigan, Izabella Miko and Adam G. Sevani.
Asta is invited to a memorial. It's been ten years since her
university friend August died. The invitation disrupts everything -
the novel she is working on and friendship with Mai and her
two-year-old son - reanimating longings, doubts, and the ghosts of
parties past. Soon a new story begins to take shape. Not of the
obscure Polish sculptor Asta wanted to write about, but of what
really happened the night of August's death, and in the stolen,
exuberant days leading up to it. The story she has never dared
reveal to Mai. Moving between Asta's past and present, Memorial, 29
June is a novel about who we really are, and who we thought we
would become. It's a novel about the intensity with which we
experience the world in our twenties, and how our ambitions,
anxieties, and memories from that time never relinquish their grasp
on how we encounter our future. In prose that shimmers like poetry,
masterfully translated by Misha Hoekstra, Memorial, 29 June is an
urgent yet tender reminder that sometimes pain is where the love
is, and that grief, however thorny, should never go unspoken.
Cultural Writing. German language text. Witty, charming, and full
of philosophical verve, this book discloses the paradoxes and
non-sequiturs informing Germans' love-hate relationship to America
and Americans. Mit Witz, Charme und philosophischem Biss deckt
Misha Waiman die Ungereimtheiten und Paradoxien der Hassliebe der
Deutschen zu Amerika und den Amerikanern auf.
This special book is a compilation of essays on a remarkable but
little-known story that lasted over half a century of
world-renowned physicist, the late Sir Rudolf Peierls and his wife
Genia Kannegiser. Peierls collected a lot of prestigious awards in
his lifetime, and in the beginning of WW2, he and Otto Frisch were
responsible for the inception of the Anglo-American nuclear program
(1940). He was also one of the key contributors in the research at
Los Alamos during those turbulent times.Most previous books on
Peierls have focused on his scientific research, while the contents
for this volume sheds light on his private life in dramatic
circumstances. The extensive contributions were not only gathered
from the relatives of Genia, the couple's daughters, Landau's
students, and from Russian and English archives, but they also
include the unique perspectives of the author who is a professional
theoretical physicist and is also fluent in Russian, his native
language.So, this fascinating story of love, friendship and physics
between Rudolf and Genia is being told for the first time from a
surprisingly new angle through correspondence between Genia and
Rudolf, memoirs and other documents, interesting and informal
excerpts from Peierls' private 'diary' covering the years 1979-1994
that will take the reader on a journey through communism, world
war, the trials and tribulations of the loving couple with
distinctly very different personalities.
This special book is a compilation of essays on a remarkable but
little-known story that lasted over half a century of
world-renowned physicist, the late Sir Rudolf Peierls and his wife
Genia Kannegiser. Peierls collected a lot of prestigious awards in
his lifetime, and in the beginning of WW2, he and Otto Frisch were
responsible for the inception of the Anglo-American nuclear program
(1940). He was also one of the key contributors in the research at
Los Alamos during those turbulent times.Most previous books on
Peierls have focused on his scientific research, while the contents
for this volume sheds light on his private life in dramatic
circumstances. The extensive contributions were not only gathered
from the relatives of Genia, the couple's daughters, Landau's
students, and from Russian and English archives, but they also
include the unique perspectives of the author who is a professional
theoretical physicist and is also fluent in Russian, his native
language.So, this fascinating story of love, friendship and physics
between Rudolf and Genia is being told for the first time from a
surprisingly new angle through correspondence between Genia and
Rudolf, memoirs and other documents, interesting and informal
excerpts from Peierls' private 'diary' covering the years 1979-1994
that will take the reader on a journey through communism, world
war, the trials and tribulations of the loving couple with
distinctly very different personalities.
This book presents the first detailed biography of George Placzek -
an outstanding physicist, a participant in the Manhattan Project
who stood at the very inception of nuclear physics and the
subsequent development of the nuclear bomb in the course of the
WWII. In the 1930s, George Placzek was known as an adventurous
person with a sharp sense of humor, a tireless generator of novel
physics ideas which he generously shared with his colleagues. Born
in Brno (now Czech Republic) into a wealthy Jewish family, he lost
all his relatives to Holocaust, casting a tragic shadow on his
life.Placzek's scientific career began in the late 1920s when the
quantum revolution was almost over, but nuclear physics was still
at its infancy. He established personal and scientific relations
with the creators of quantum mechanics, such as Heisenberg in
Leipzig and Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. In Rome, he worked with
Fermi, and in Copenhagen he became a part of Bohr's nuclear physics
team which dominated nuclear theory at that time. The scope of
Placzek's pilgrimage around world physics centers in the 1930s was
unique among his colleagues. In January 1939, George Placzek
managed to emigrate from Europe to the US, and became a part of the
British Mission within the Manhattan Project. His physical insights
were instrumental in advancing from the basic discoveries on
nuclear chain reactions to the Trinity experiment, Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.This book is a unique compilation of a large number of
previously unknown and unpublished documents from private and
university archives, police reports, etc. Placzek's correspondence
with the leadership of the Hebrew University in 1934, the 1937 NKVD
interrogation files of Konrad Weisselberg, recollections of Ella
Andriesse as well as the Zurich Police report of 1956 detailing the
circumstances of Placzek's death in a Zurich hotel are illuminating
as they shed light on poorly known pages of his life.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! From Misha Collins, actor, longtime
poet, and activist, whose massive online following calls itself his
"Army For Good," comes his debut poetry collection, Some Things I
Still Can't Tell You. Trademark wit and subtle vulnerability
converge in each poem; this book is both a celebration of and
aspiration for a life well lived. #1 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BESTSELLER!
USA TODAY Bestseller! This book is a compilation of small
observations and musings. It's filled with moments of reflection
and a love letter to simple joys: passing a simple blade of grass
on the sidewalk, the freedom of peeing outdoors late at night, or
the way a hand-built ceramic mug feels when it's full of warm tea
on a chilly morning. It's a catalog and a compendium that examines
the complicated experience of being all too human and interacting
with a complex, confounding, breathtaking world ... and a reminder
to stop and be awake and alive in yourself.
Recently discovered ancient silk and bamboo manuscripts have
transformed our understanding of classical Chinese thought. In this
book, Wang Zhongjiang closely examines these texts and, by parsing
the complex divergence between ancient and modern Chinese records,
reveals early Chinese philosophy to be much richer and more complex
than we ever imagined. As numerous and varied cosmologies sprang up
in this cradle of civilization, beliefs in the predictable
movements of nature merged with faith in gods and their divine
punishments. Slowly, powerful spirits and gods were stripped of
their potency as nature's constant order awakened people to the
possibility of universal laws, and those laws finally gave birth to
an ideally conceived community, objectively managed and rationally
ordered.
This visionary and engaging book provides a mathematical
perspective on the fundamental ideas of numbers, space, life,
evolution, the brain and the mind. The author suggests how a
development of mathematical concepts in the spirit of category
theory may lead to unravelling the mystery of the human mind and
the design of universal learning algorithms. The book is divided
into two parts, the first of which describes the ideas of great
mathematicians and scientists, those who saw sparks of light in the
dark sea of unknown. The second part, Memorandum Ergo, reflects on
how mathematics can contribute to the understanding of the mystery
of thought. It argues that the core of the human mind is a
structurally elaborated object that needs a creation of a broad
mathematical context for its understanding. Readers will discover
the main properties of the expected mathematical objects within
this context, called ERGO-SYSTEMS, and readers will see how these
"systems" may serve as prototypes for design of universal learning
computer programs. This is a work of great, poetical insight and is
richly illustrated. It is a highly attractive read for all those
who welcome a mathematical and scientific way of thinking about the
world.
Studying and using light or "photons" to image and then to
control and transmit molecular information is among the most
challenging and significant research fields to emerge in recent
years. One of the fastest growing areas involves research in the
temporal imaging of quantum phenomena, ranging from molecular
dynamics in the femto (10-15s) time regime for atomic motion to the
atto (10-18s) time scale of electron motion. In fact, the
attosecond "revolution" is now recognized as one of the most
important recent breakthroughs and innovations in the science of
the 21st century. A major participant in the development of
ultrafast femto and attosecond temporal imaging of molecular
quantum phenomena has been theory and numerical simulation of the
nonlinear, non-perturbative response of atoms and molecules to
ultrashort laser pulses. Therefore, imaging quantum dynamics is a
new frontier of science requiring advanced mathematical approaches
for analyzing and solving spatial and temporal multidimensional
partial differential equations such as Time-Dependent Schroedinger
Equations (TDSE) andTime-Dependent Dirac equations (TDDEs for
relativistic phenomena). These equations are also coupled to the
photons in Maxwell's equations for collective propagation effects.
Inversion of the experimental imaging data of quantum dynamics
presents new mathematical challenges in the imaging of quantum wave
coherences on subatomic (subnanometer) spatial dimensions and
multiple timescales from atto to femto and even nanoseconds.In
"Quantum Dynamic Imaging: Theoretical and Numerical Methods,"
leading researchers discuss these exciting state-of-the-art
developments and theirimplications for R&D in view of the
promise of quantum dynamic imagingscience as the essential tool for
controlling matter at the molecular level."
Pattern Formation in Morphogenesis is a rich source of interesting
and challenging mathematical problems. The volume aims at showing
how a combination of new discoveries in developmental biology and
associated modelling and computational techniques has stimulated or
may stimulate relevant advances in the field. Finally it aims at
facilitating the process of unfolding a mutual recognition between
Biologists and Mathematicians of their complementary skills, to the
point where the resulting synergy generates new and novel
discoveries. It offers an interdisciplinary interaction space
between biologists from embryology, genetics and molecular biology
who present their own work in the perspective of the advancement of
their specific fields, and mathematicians who propose solutions
based on the knowledge grasped from biologists.
Agape's Performance shows God's unconditional love for the life and
destiny of each reader. In Agape's Performance, Agape teaches
Destiny His ways of wisdom and love. Let your own destiny follow
and learn the ways of Agape as He shows what one must do to enjoy
life and have many happy days. Show Agape your love by living for
Him and following His unique path for you called, the best way of
all, the way of love. Beautifully and uniquely illustrated in
colored pencil media, Agape's Performance flower collection speaks
of living the love life freely given by Agape, the most strongest
force in the universe. Agape's Performance is a wonderful treasure
book that presents an expressive collection of Scriptures intended
for all of God's children, both young and old from all walks of
life. "Live for Me and I will show you" says Agape. In Agape's
Performance, Agape plainly speaks on the path of life as uniquely
portrayed in the NCV translation of The Holy Scriptures.
Different Faces of Geometry - edited by the world renowned
geometers S. Donaldson, Ya. Eliashberg, and M. Gromov - presents
the current state, new results, original ideas and open questions
from the following important topics in modern geometry:
Amoebas and Tropical Geometry
Convex Geometry and Asymptotic Geometric Analysis
Differential Topology of 4-Manifolds
3-Dimensional Contact Geometry
Floer Homology and Low-Dimensional Topology
Kahler Geometry
Lagrangian and Special Lagrangian Submanifolds
Refined Seiberg-Witten Invariants.
These apparently diverse topics have a common feature in that
they are all areas of exciting current activity. The Editors have
attracted an impressive array of leading specialists to author
chapters for this volume: G. Mikhalkin (USA-Canada-Russia), V.D.
Milman (Israel) and A.A. Giannopoulos (Greece), C. LeBrun (USA), Ko
Honda (USA), P. Ozsvath (USA) and Z. Szabo (USA), C. Simpson
(France), D. Joyce (UK) and P. Seidel (USA), and S. Bauer
(Germany).
"One can distinguish various themes running through the
different contributions. There is some emphasis on invariants
defined by elliptic equations and their applications in
low-dimensional topology, symplectic and contact geometry (Bauer,
Seidel, Ozsvath and Szabo). These ideas enter, more tangentially,
in the articles of Joyce, Honda and LeBrun. Here and elsewhere, as
well as explaining the rapid advances that have been made, the
articles convey a wonderful sense of the vast areas lying beyond
our current understanding.
Simpson's article emphasizes the need for interesting new
constructions (in that case of Kahler and algebraic manifolds), a
point which is also made by Bauer in the context of 4-manifolds and
the "11/8 conjecture."
LeBrun's article gives another perspective on 4-manifold theory,
via Riemannian geometry, and the challenging open questions
involving the geometry of even "well-known" 4-manifolds.
There are also striking contrasts between the articles. The authors
have taken different approaches: for example, the thoughtful essay
of Simpson, the new research results of LeBrun and the thorough
expositions with homework problems of Honda.
One can also ponder the differences in the style of mathematics. In
the articles of Honda, Giannopoulos and Milman, and Mikhalkin, the
"geometry" is present in a very vivid and tangible way; combining
respectively with topology, analysis and algebra. The papers of
Bauer and Seidel, on the other hand, makes the point that algebraic
and algebro-topological abstraction (triangulated categories,
spectra) can play an important role in very unexpected ways in
concrete geometric problems." - From the Preface by the Editors
"
Advances in sensing, signal processing, and computer technology
during the past half century have stimulated numerous attempts to
design general-purpose ma chines that see. These attempts have met
with at best modest success and more typically outright failure.
The difficulties encountered in building working com puter vision
systems based on state-of-the-art techniques came as a surprise.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the problem is that machine
vision sys tems cannot deal with numerous visual tasks that humans
perform rapidly and effortlessly. In reaction to this perceived
discrepancy in performance, various researchers (notably Marr,
1982) suggested that the design of machine-vision systems should be
based on principles drawn from the study of biological systems.
This "neuro morphic" or "anthropomorphic" approach has proven
fruitful: the use of pyramid (multiresolution) image representation
methods in image compression is one ex ample of a successful
application based on principles primarily derived from the study of
biological vision systems. It is still the case, however, that the
perfor of computer vision systems falls far short of that of the
natural systems mance they are intended to mimic, suggesting that
it is time to look even more closely at the remaining differences
between artificial and biological vision systems."
The classical theory of partial differential equations is rooted in
physics, where equations (are assumed to) describe the laws of
nature. Law abiding functions, which satisfy such an equation, are
very rare in the space of all admissible functions (regardless of a
particular topology in a function space). Moreover, some additional
(like initial or boundary) conditions often insure the uniqueness
of solutions. The existence of these is usually established with
some apriori estimates which locate a possible solution in a given
function space. We deal in this book with a completely different
class of partial differential equations (and more general
relations) which arise in differential geometry rather than in
physics. Our equations are, for the most part, undetermined (or, at
least, behave like those) and their solutions are rather dense in
spaces of functions. We solve and classify solutions of these
equations by means of direct (and not so direct) geometric
constructions. Our exposition is elementary and the proofs of the
basic results are selfcontained. However, there is a number of
examples and exercises (of variable difficulty), where the
treatment of a particular equation requires a certain knowledge of
pertinent facts in the surrounding field. The techniques we employ,
though quite general, do not cover all geometrically interesting
equations. The border of the unexplored territory is marked by a
number of open questions throughout the book.
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